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Those of you who know me are aware that visual art is not my forte. I am a writer, professionally, and my primary creative hobby is music. Heck, I have more ability in web design than visual art or graphic design. So what's this all about?

Well, many years ago--long before I determined that I should be a writer--I wrote and drew every day, usually for four to five hours at a stretch, trying to flesh out my (admittedly underdeveloped) concepts for video games. Now, I wasn't very disciplined about the drawing, especially not in comparison to the writing. I read constantly, and challenged myself all the time with hard material, and even straight-up dictionary browsing. Yet, I impatiently just tried to make whatever I wanted to appear on the paper appear fully formed without studying anatomy, perspective, lighting...any of those things.

Writing pushed art aside for me because I grew into a much stronger writer than an artist. But now, I find myself in a position where I'm doing very nearly all of my own promotional work, and I've had to dabble in some basic graphic design lately. I've enjoyed it, a lot. I've remembered the thrill of getting something visually represented just so that happened, albeit rarely, when I drew frequently. So I've decided to pick up these things I set aside now thirteen years ago and commit to the following things:

The results will be posted on the day of their completion, as soon as all three are ready, and a 'day' shall be counted as one period of continued consciousness, since I have a habit of staying up well into the night.

Let me stress that I should be counted as a complete novice in all of these endeavors. My hope is that, over the next few years, I shall gain a modicum of skill through constant practice, but for the time being, do not expect anything too impressive. I would rather receive pointed, constructive criticism, and suggestions for reference material than generic compliments or assurances.

I will upload the first day's work tonight. In the meantime, so we don't start this off the wrong way without any content...

Here's an image I made for Moczo's wonderful Fate/Stay Night fanfiction, Chaos Theory. This illustrates about where I'm at with graphic design.

This was the only process I had any concrete direction for today: I knew I wanted to start with some basic human anatomy. However, I'm not really clear on what books I should be looking for to get the best references.

I had absolutely no sense of direction on this, so while I called this a 'value study' (even though it's fairly evident I did a hack job at values), it was really more a test to see what I can do both right-handed (I'm a lefty) and with a mouse (I'm going to order a cheap, simple Wacom tablet.)

Spent all day on other things...which is fine, except that I didn't make time for my challenge until it was already 12:30. And damn, did it make focusing hard. Lesson learned? Don't wait so damn late to do this!

My sketching was relatively aimless tonight. I want to develop some kind of plan-of-attack for this stuff.

I feel better about the graphic design today. It's not as sophisticated as I'd have liked, but when consciousness is slipping from my grasp so quickly, I can't be that picky.

I should chop my balls off for this, but I was most tired when doing this, and it was basically 'force yourself to put something out to keep yourself in the spirit of the challenge.'

Since I have a simple Wacom tablet on the way (early Christmas gift from my family), I've opted to stick to sketching and graphic design until it arrives in a couple days, then I can actually do something resembling digital painting.

My sketches today comprised some basic perspective study stuff. Nothing earth-shattering, but I feel like I made a tiny bit of sense of things today. I know it will be a while before my improvement is notable, but hey, I'll take what I can get.

My graphic design today was just a simple exercise in messing with layered lighting effects, and also trying to make large bodies of text fit more naturally in otherwise 'negative' space.

For the first time in a while, I had a day to myself entirely uninterrupted by other people, work obligations or illness in which to focus solely on creative endeavors. I devoted most of my time to the one that happens to be my job, but I took some pleasure in my practice stuff, primitive as it is today.

Today brought about an attempt to apply my modeling of the skull. While the relative positioning of things has improved over my earlier unreferenced drawings, nothing about this is yet at the rather low level of my referenced drawings. However, now I can see with relative ease where things broke down and how I need to practice to improve.

I confess that I'm actually fairly happy with this. While my graphic designs are more free-form experiments than my study-oriented sketches, I do feel like I'm learning things little by little.

Proper use of gradient overlays is still something I'm experimenting with. Obviously in this case, the text rendered a smoother fade a bit impractical, as it would have ended with less legible text further down. Unfortunately, I still need to experiment with text coloration.

I was hoping it'd take longer than this for me to fall behind for the first time...but such is the way of things. Yesterday was primarily spent trying to troubleshoot some RAM management problems on my computer, which I managed to fix...around 3 A.M. last night, and today I was quite preoccupied with my work. I started trying to learn my newly arrived Wacom tablet...it's certainly a novel experience for me, operating a computer this way, but I'm excited to learn. All I have to offer today is the resultant first skull sketch.

Due to extenuating circumstances, today was another one of those days I could only get one piece done. That being said, I am very happy with the piece. It was a fun little project and concept. Behold, a fake poster!